


Safe Harbor

by cheerynoir



Series: Drowning!verse [5]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Abusive Relationships, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Denial, Forehead Kisses, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, POV Second Person, Platonic Cuddling, Robb's not as oblivious as Theon would like to think, Sharing a Bed, pffft "platonic"
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-21
Updated: 2015-03-21
Packaged: 2018-03-18 20:03:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,351
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3582132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cheerynoir/pseuds/cheerynoir
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em> April </em>
</p><p>Theon can't sleep, and he aches right down to his bones. But everything's fine, don't worry about it. Robb helps.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Safe Harbor

Robb’s always been tactile. You’re used to it by now, the way he’ll walk close enoughthat your shoulders will brush, the way he’ll grab you by the hand or sit with his back against your side and his head against your shoulder for no particular reason other than to be close. He does the same with Smalljon, Glover, and the rest of his college crew.

It drives you insane, but slowly. Sweetly.

He doesn’t mean it like you want him to, you know he doesn’t, but you’re too goddamn greedy to tell him to stop. You like it too much, even if it hurts.

(He used to crawl into your bed, when he was nine and scrawny and you were twelve and even worse. You shared a room and he had nightmares. Having someone close helped you sleep. Helped you forget that the air was too dry and you couldn’t hear the sea outside your window.

He does it now, too, but you’re usually drunk when you collapse together. But sometimes you’ll wander into your apartment and find him asleep in your bed when he should be in class. Sometimes you wonder if Robb still has nightmares.)

Robb’s always been tactile, and you’re used to it. That’s the only reason you don’t flinch when he takes your chin in hand when you show up at his door at some god-awful hour and turns your face to one side until he can get a better look at your jaw. There’s a bruise there, purple-black, a couple days old. You don’t know if it came from Ramsay’s hand or his teeth. Both, maybe. You don’t remember.

There are similar marks on your hips and your neck and your shoulders. There is rope-burn on your wrists and ankles.

It doesn’t mean anything.

It’s just sex – a bit rougher than usual, sure. But it’s just sex. It’s fine. You’re fine.

(You don’t know how to be anything but fine, held together with a brittle smile and your own reassurances.)

“Bar fight,” you say, summoning up a smirk. You’re glad that it’s still February; that your turtle-neck and your layers won’t be questioned. You don’t want to explain masochism to Robb. Especially not since you’ve been indulging in it with him for years. The marks are just harder to find, that’s all.

His attention drops to your hands, hanging at your sides and half-curled into nervous fists. He touches your wrist lightly, curls his fingers under yours for a better look. It’s ridiculous, but it reminds you of some old painting – a knight and his fair lady. You think he’s going to kiss your knuckles for a second, and you almost smile. Almost.

It hits you too late what he’s doing. Too late for you to pull away without arousing suspicion, anyway. There are scars on your knuckles from all the times you’ve broken the skin open on someone’s teeth; he’s lectured you on it before, even as he dumped peroxide on the damage. You watch him watch your hands. He rubs a thumb over the unbroken skin slowly. Gently. You’re not even bruised.

“Some fight,” he says at last, quiet.

He looks at you with something old in his eyes, old and sad, and you can’t read it. It scares you a little – you’ve prided yourself on knowing this boy, his tics and his tells and his self-sacrificing sweetness – but you don’t let it show. You’ve always had a better poker-face than him.

“Theon,” he says. Stops. He chews his lower lip red and raw, and you track the movement like you always do. You want to kiss him, but it’s a distant stirring in your hollowed-out chest. It’s more habit than anything else at this point. You’re too tired for desire. Ramsay exhausts you.

“Yeah?” the word doesn’t break, but you’re not a good enough person to mask your fatigue. It’s manipulative, but you don’t care. Robb – Robb’s a good friend. He looks after you.

Something in his expression goes soft. “Nothing,” he says. He doesn’t let go of your hand, just leads you by it like a kid dragging a balloon along behind him. Through the living room and past the kitchen, down the hall and past Smalljon’s bedroom – usually loud with muffled music or laughter, but quiet, now. The apartment is dark, and you wonder what time it is.

It’s warm though, the apartment. Your eyes drift shut. Robb leads and you follow and it’s so easy you should be humiliated. You’re not, though. There’s not much room for shame, when Ramsay is in your life. He taught you that – like he taught you about bondage and subspace and how boundaries were guidelines and how good pain could feel, when he was the one doling it out. Most of the time, anyway.

You shy away from that train of thought. It’s dangerous. You like Ramsay. The sex is good. He distracts you from the other shit in your life. You should be grateful. You _are_ grateful.

You’re so tired.

When you come back to yourself, you’re sitting on the edge of Robb’s unmade bed and he’s standing between your spread legs –

(A flash of muscle-memory: three days ago Ramsay had you like this and wound his fingers around your neck until you blacked out. The last thing you remember is falling back against the mattress, your fingers white-knuckled around his wrists trying to pry him loose and his breath hot on your face and the world going grey at the edges like something out of a bad movie. You don’t remember coming, but he got off fucking your mouth and you thanked him afterward with his come dripping down your chin. He’d liked that.)

— And he’s looking at you like you’re breaking his heart.

“Theon,” he says again. He cups your face like you’re made of broken glass and spun sugar, gently, so gently. “You know you can tell me anything, right?”

The streetlight cuts through the curtains and slashes across his face in a wash of orange. Highlights the stubble on his jaw and the blue of his eyes, the red of his mouth. He blinks and his eyelashes cast queer shadows across his cheeks. His hair is a wild mess of curls, and it occurs to you too late that you’ve woken him up and dragged him from his bed.

All the same, your mouth is suddenly dry. It is all you can do to keep from reaching up and touching him. Your fingers itch and you’re distantly aware of wanting to run them up his thigh, to rub over the worn-soft fabric of his shorts.

“Yeah,” you say, after a small eternity has passed. “Of course, Robb. I know that.”

You smile, business as usual, but he only swallows and looks away.

“Okay. Just so you know,” he says. His voice is thick in his throat and catching in his lungs. You wonder: sleep or sickness?

Either way, you’ve kept him awake for long enough. You touch his hip with leaden fingers. He’s very warm. He’s always been warmer than you. He doesn’t flinch at how cold your hands are, never has, and you like that.

“Come on then, it’s late,” you say. You grip his t-shirt and tug. “You should sleep. I’ll go-”

“Stay,” he says. He covers your hands with his own. “Please stay.”

You shouldn’t. Ramsay’s taken to staying at your place on Pyke, because you don’t have a roommate other than Asha, and Asha’s never home. Ramsay doesn’t like waking up to find you gone, even though you’ve told him you don’t sleep all that well. That you wander at night. He worries.

But Robb touches you like you’re something more than a good fuck (not that he would know). He touches you like you’re something worthy of sweetness. His thumb traces the jut of your cheekbone, sweeps softly under one eye. It had been black the last time you’d seen him.

“Sure, Robb. Whatever you want.”

He smiles, relief spilling across his face like sunshine. “Thank you,” he says. He ducks down and kisses your forehead, like he used to do for his brothers before they got too old for such things. It burns like a brand, and you fight to keep from rubbing the spot. “Do you want something to sleep in?”

If you tried to explain the marks on your body, Robb wouldn’t understand. He’d think it was something – something _else_. The burns and the bruises – it would only worry him, regardless of the fact that it’s just a kinky thing and that you like them. That you ask for them.

(Ramsay only gives you what you ask for – verbally or otherwise. Sometimes you don’t even know that you’re asking until he gives you what you want. You’re lucky that way. He’s so perceptive.) 

“No,” you say, and shake your head slightly. He doesn’t let his hands fall from your face. You smile again, smaller, and his brow creases. “It’s cold,” you explain. You’re always cold, up North. He used to tease you about wearing layers in July. 

“If you’re sure,” he says, like a question. “Your clothes…” 

“They’ll keep. Just go to sleep, Stark.” 

He drops to his knees instead, and your heart stops. Tension thrumming through you and you freeze like a rabbit in the headlights of an oncoming truck. “Robb?” 

“Your boots,” he says, and your feel him jerking at the laces. “Are coming off before you climb into my bed. It’s a rule.” 

“That you just made up,” you protest, for the sake of it. His head is bowed, shoulders hunched, but you’d bet what’s left in your savings account that he’s smiling. 

“Yeah,” he says. One boot falls, then the other. He steals your socks and you curl your toes at the sudden chill. If he notices the state of your ankles, he doesn’t let on. You don’t think he saw, and that helps you relax. 

Your belt comes next, left stretched across the floor like a lazily coiled snake. 

You think he’s going to continue – peel the sweater from your body and drag your jeans down over your hips. Ramsay’s done that before, when you’re too tired to do it yourself. But Robb doesn’t. He leaves you in your jeans and your turtleneck and lets you settle under the sheets on your own. 

He curls close when you finally do. Close but not touching. You want him to. 

Gods drown you in bleach and lye, but you want him to touch you. 

(Ramsay would be angry to know he’s not enough. He’d be hurt. 

Ramsay isn’t here. 

And you want Robb to touch you.) 

Robb’s always known you better than you’d like. He’s known how to read your silences and your smiles and your twitchy hands when you never gave him reason to care. Now he brushes the side of your hand lightly with his own beneath the sheets, a ghost of a touch. “Alright?” he asks, quiet. 

“…Yeah,” you say at last. It’s not a lie. Your fingers twitch. It’s no hardship to tangle them with his. 

He smiles, tired and fond, and tightens his grip. You let him. 

You don’t remember falling asleep, but waking up is a slow, warm process. You drift for a good long while, the noises from the street and the kitchen coming to you at a dreamy distance, muffled by your dozing and the pillow over your head. You become aware, first, of the sweat drying sticky on your skin. The stuffy heat that only lasts so long as you don’t poke a toe out of the blanket-cocoon you’ve wrapped yourself in. You breathe in and smell coffee, but it isn’t enough to get you up. One of your arms is asleep, might be gone from the elbow down for all you know, but you just sigh and lick your dry lips. 

_Do I work today?_ You wonder hazily, and curl your toes in contentment. _Do I have somewhere to be?_ You don’t care. 

You’re warm and lazy and so comfortable it should be a crime. 

Yawning, you shift and curl up on your side rather than sprawl out on your stomach like you usually do. When you open your eyes again, the reason for your numbness is clear: 

Robb’s stolen your left arm and clutched it to his chest. Stretched out on his back, his right hand keeps your left over his heart. Like he’s just a boy with a teddy bear. Like you could ever offer him anything, even comfort. 

If you could be bothered, you would fish your phone from you jeans and take some record of this, just to fuck with him later (just so you could have some concrete proof that it happened outside your head, you mean). 

But you can’t be bothered. So you turn your hand over slowly instead and press your palm gently to his chest, just to feel his heart beat against your fingertips. He’s so warm. 

Sunlight streaking through the half-closed blinds paint him in gold. It brings out the red in his hair, the flush of heat in his face. Your mouth is dry, but for a moment, one syrupy-slow second, you can see what it would be like – shuffling across the scant space between you and he, slanting your bitten-raw mouth over his, the barest hint of pressure, the answering ghost of a smile – before you blink and the illusion shatters. 

He is just a boy, sleeping. And you are just a creature, watching. 

A line of poetry comes to you then, blinking star-dust and boyish dreams from your gritty eyes. _Everyone needs a place. It shouldn’t be inside of someone else._ You can’t remember who wrote it, just that you ferreted the slim volume of poems around with you from foster home to foster home until it fell apart. 

You smile then, brittle, and your jaw aches where Ramsay bruised it. 

There are six missed calls and twice as many unread messages on your phone when you check. 

You’re gone by the time Robb wakes up. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading, guys -- I hope you liked the breather. It's pretty much fluff, right? Let me know what you thought!
> 
> [Theonaf](http://www.theonaf.tumblr.com/), my lovely beta, thanks so much for giving this a skim. And an extra thank-you to everyone else who commented so far - you're all awesome!
> 
> Come say hi on [tumblr](http://www.cheerynoir.tumblr.com/)!
> 
> Oh -- and the poem Theon remembers is from "Detail of the Woods" by Richard Siken.


End file.
